After the End

By Clare Mackintosh

I can’t have both lives. I can only live this one.

It seems that in everyone’s life, there falls a time when a decision forced upon them portends events one could never have foreseen. Clare Mackintosh, at once gentle and fierce, takes us into that journey when a young couple is forced to make a life or death decision for their only child.

She writes this novel from experience and it shows. In a note from the author she says:

In 2006, my husband and I were faced with an impossible decision: to keep our critically ill son alive, or to remove his life support and let him die. It was a decision that needed to be made swiftly and by both of us. I asked the consultant what would happen if we wanted different outcomes, if we couldn’t agree. “You have to",” she said.

Clare walks us down this path in her fictional account of a young couple grappling with the same decisions. I can’t remember the last time I felt such visceral emotion while reading a novel. It called up my own journey with grief, reminding me of its continued raw presence. But it also invited me into a haunting exploration of decisions. Decisions I made in the narrow confines of right or wrong. Decisions I review and ponder in my mind still. And in the end, this story brought me both comfort and redemption as I considered, yet again, the outcomes of those decisions. Clare walked me into that space which I am certain she worked very hard to find for herself.

We want to name decisions right or wrong. It helps us to sleep and night and gives us a sure sense of what to expect. And yet. The very naming of right and wrong is what also prevents us from receiving, from the liminal space of unknowing, the blessings awaiting there.

Clare Mackintosh shows us this truth. Her book is a gift.